548
OANY
COHN-BENOIT
In his recent articles Touraine has presented the following idea:
There is a university system whose function is to produce knowledge in
order to serve growth (again!), and this system contains a contradiction
fertile for change among students and professors. The university is
analogous, in its conflicts and in its essential social function, to the
business enterprise of the nineteenth century, Touraine says.
But this comparison of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is
fallacious. It is not true that "knowledge and technological progress are
the moving forces of the new society." Knowledge and technological
progress in the new society are subordinated to competition among
firms for profit (or for the monopolistic hegemony, which amounts to
the same thing ) and to the military and economic confrontation be–
tween the countries of the East and the West. Scientists are not the
innocent entrepreneurs we are asked to believe they are, nor is science
this glorious autonomous activity whose only goal is its own development.
The university as a unit of reference is not viable. The contradic–
tions occur on the level of the society as a whole, and the university par–
ticipates in these contradictions almost unanimously. The majority of
professors and students are committed to the preservation of order and
only a minority can take part in the confrontation that
IS
occurring in
the large cities and 'the exploited countries. The recent gesture of groups
of students here in Nanterre aligning themselves, without disgust at their
own servility, with the administration and the majority of the teaching
body, is only the most recent evidence of this truth.
Possibilities and Limitations of the Student Confrontation
We must dissipate the illusion, created by Stalinist and Tourainian
slogans, of a mass student movement with convergent interests. By their
social origin as by their willingness to become salaried employes of vari–
ous authoritarian machines (government, business, advertising agency,
etc. ), the majority of students are already conservative.
Only a minority of students and professors (especially assistants)
can choose arid actually do choose another orientation. What, then, are
the possibilities for action for this minority?
In the university milieu the prospects are limited. Essentially, it is
a question ,of enlightening the students regarding the social function of
the university. Particularly in sociology, it is necessary to expose the false
issues, explain: the generally repressive function of the career of socio–
logist, and ' dispel the illusions on this subject.
The hypocrisy of objectivity (see Bourricaud, the cultural con–
science of the Department of Education ) , of apoliticism, of innocent
